Music: Four chances to see guitar ace Jimmy Vivino

By Chad Berndtson/For The Patriot Ledger

Thursday

Jun 14, 2018 at 4:04 AM

Jimmy Vivino knows a few people.

“Duke Levine. So good. I feel like he’s famous among the guitar community, unknown more broadly than that like Danny Gatton was for so long, and the nicest cat. I know his brother Buzz, too, he deals me guitars. We haven’t played together, so this will be fun.”

“Mike Welch will be at my ONCE show. I knew him when he was 12 years old. I remember him, and people like Derek Trucks and Duane Betts and Devon Allman when they were all little kids. There’s another generation out there doing it now.”

“Duke Robillard will be with me in Fall River. He’s one of the guys who when first got to New York, I went to the Bottom Line to see when he was in his full-blown T-Bone Walker mode with Roomful of Blues. Wow. I was like, I gotta know this guy!”

The guitar ace isn’t just name dropping favorite guitarist pals with strong associations to the Boston area. All of his collaborators are also his friends and admirers, legends of the music scene and less-recognized journeymen alike. He knows them all, he’s played with most of them, and when he’s in town, they’ll often oblige him with a sit-in or a full-band gig.

Levine, Welch and Robillard will all be guests during Vivino's upcoming Northeast swing with a band called the East Coast Blue Soul Rockers, which is Vivino with another pair of musician's musicians with strong Boston ties: bassist Jesse Williams and drummer Mark Teixeira. There'll be others joining in, too -- some of them whom Vivino won't be announcing in advance.

"It shouldn’t matter who’ll be there — come on and see us,” Vivino said. “But I guarantee there’ll be some friends sitting in here and there, and I really guarantee you’ll have a good time. I can’t wait to do this.”

The band has a whole slew of local shows, starting June 19 as part of Extended Play Sessions in Norwood, June 20 at ONCE in Somerville, June 21 as part of Front Street Concerts in Hopkinton, and June 28 at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, with Robillard aboard.

Vivino, 63, is beloved in the music community. He’s best known to national audiences as the longtime guitarist and later bandleader for late night TV’s Conan O’Brien — whom he followed to Los Angeles a decade ago, and these days, is still his main gig. But he's seemingly everywhere, from Conan to his longtime Beatles outfit, the Fab Faux, to any number of collaborations and short-lived, long-running, occasional or recurring bands such as the Prisoners of 2nd Avenue, Al and the Rekooperators (featuring his old friend Al Kooper), and the Midnight Ramble Band, well-known to fans of late The Band drummer/singer Levon Helm.

“I never know what’s going to happen. I did decide this year that I’d start playing around L.A. a bit more, and it started as a trio, and then somewhere five more guys have joined us onstage by the end of the gig,” Vivino said, laughing. “I try to reach out to people and get them out to play. Honestly, there’s not much touring going on in my life, and then when I am out, there aren’t as many clubs, particularly blues clubs, in places like Boston and New York and Chicago, where you just used to run into everyone. So I call my friends when I’m coming to town.”

Vivino isn't shy. Interviews quickly turn on his raconteur personality, and his stories are fascinating. He reaches out to fellow musicians, finds and works with people he’s heard of but never met, and doesn’t hesitate to offer a handshake.

“I was shy with [guitar great] Mike Bloomfield, admiring but afraid to say hello, I don’t know, I didn’t want to bother him,” Vivino said, laughing. “But then he died. And I decided it was the last time I was going to do that. If I dig a cat, I’ll say hello. The intimidation thing is totally not worth it. Go up there and say hello.”

Growing up in New Jersey and New York, Vivino saw legends like Cream, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and understood the power of stretching out songs live beyond what they sounded like on record. A Vivino band can get plenty jammy and unpredictable; even the Fab Faux experiments within the boundaries of the Beatles catalog.

“We don’t want to be running a Broadway show up there, or make it ‘The Hall of Presidents’ or something: animatronic Beatles or what not,” he said of the Fab Faux, which played Boston a few weeks ago. “As a musician, the best part of doing this, in any of the work I do, is the conversation on stage with people who want to also have a conversation. There has to be room to open things up. You have to be able to create more space than what’s contained on the records. The excitement for me seeing bands like Zeppelin and Cream and all that was anticipating, man, whoa, they’re going to open this [stuff] up live.”

O’Brien has been one of Vivino’s constant associates even in such a varied career. The guitarist goes back all the way to the first episode of "Late Night with Conan O’Brien" in 1993, playing in The Max Weinberg 7. He moved to L.A. with O’Brien and Weinberg in 2008, and following Weinberg's departure in 2010, took over what became Jimmy Vivino and the Basic Cable Band (which also includes his older brother Jerry Vivino) for “Conan” on TBS.

“It was the first two years of these last 10 we’d like to forget,” Vivino said, referencing O’Brien’s acrimonious departure from NBC after briefly succeeding Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show." “But Conan, that kid was brought up right. He treated us like family all throughout that mess, and he gave us a sense — a real sense — that it was all going to be OK. And now, let’s see, we’re in our eighth season of 'Conan' and having fun every day. So I think it’s been OK!”